Category Archives: Business Strategy

While one of The Who’s first hit singles, I Can See for Miles, was most certainly not about data visualization, it still might – – on a bit of a stretch – – find a fitting a new context in describing one of the latest dazzling new technologies in the opening stanza’s declaration “there’s magic in my eye”. In determining Who’s who and what’s what about all this, let’s have a look at report on a new tool enabling data scientists to indeed “see for miles and miles” in an exciting new manner.

This innovative approach was recently the subject of a fascinating article by an augmented reality (AR) designer named Benjamin Resnick about his team’s work at IBM on a project called Immersive Insights, entitled Visualizing High Dimensional Data In Augmented Reality, posted on July 3, 2017 on Medium.com. (Also embedded is a very cool video of a demo of this system.) They are applying AR’s rapidly advancing technology1 to display, interpret and leverage insights gained from business data. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize and annotate it here and then pose a few real-world questions of my own.

Immersive Insights into Where the Data-Points Point

As Resnick foresees such a system in several years, a user will start his or her workday by donning their AR glasses and viewing a “sea of gently glowing, colored orbs”, each of which visually displays their business’s big data sets2. The user will be able to “reach out select that data” which, in turn, will generate additional details on a nearby monitor. Thus, the user can efficiently track their data in an “aesthetically pleasing” and practical display.

The project team’s key objective is to provide a means to visualize and sum up the key “relationships in the data”. In the short-term, the team is aiming Immersive Insights towards data scientists who are facile coders, enabling them to visualize, using AR’s capabilities upon time series, geographical and networked data. For their long-term goals, they are planning to expand the range of Immersive Insight’s applicability to the work of business analysts.

For example, Instacart, a same-day food delivery service, maintains an open source data set on food purchases (accessible here). Every consumer represents a data-point wherein they can be expressed as a “list of purchased products” from among 50,000 possible items.

How can this sizable pool of data be better understood and the deeper relationships within it be extracted and understood? Traditionally, data scientists create a “matrix of 2D scatter plots” in their efforts to intuit connections in the information’s attributes. However, for those sets with many attributes, this methodology does not scale well.

Consequently, Resnick’s team has been using their own new approach to:

Lower complex data to just three dimensions in order to sum up key relationships

Visualize the data by applying their Immersive Insights application, and

“Iteratively label and color-code the data” in conjunction with an “evolving understanding” of its inner workings

Their results have enable them to “validate hypotheses more quickly” and establish a sense about the relationships within the data sets. As well, their system was built to permit users to employ a number of versatile data analysis programming languages.

The types of data sets being used here are likewise deployed in training machine learning systems3. As a result, the potential exists for these three technologies to become complementary and mutually supportive in identifying and understanding relationships within the data as well as deriving any “black box predictive models”.4

Analyzing the Instacart Data Set: Food for Thought

Passing over the more technical details provided on the creation of team’s demo in the video (linked above), and next turning to the results of the visualizations, their findings included:

A great deal of the variance in Instacart’s customers’ “purchasing patterns” was between those who bought “premium items” and those who chose less expensive “versions of similar items”. In turn, this difference has “meaningful implications” in the company’s “marketing, promotion and recommendation strategies”.

Among all food categories, produce was clearly the leader. Nearly all customers buy it.

When the users were categorized by the “most common department” they patronized, they were “not linearly separable”. This is, in terms of purchasing patterns, this “categorization” missed most of the variance in the system’s three main components (described above).

Resnick concludes that the three cornerstone technologies of Immersive Insights – – big data, augmented reality and machine learning – – are individually and in complementary combinations “disruptive” and, as such, will affect the “future of business and society”.

Questions

Can this system be used on a real-time basis? Can it be configured to handle changing data sets in volatile business markets where there are significant changes within short time periods that may affect time-sensitive decisions?

Would web metrics be a worthwhile application, perhaps as an add-on module to a service such as Google Analytics?

Is Immersive Insights limited only to business data or can it be adapted to less commercial or non-profit ventures to gain insights into processes that might affect high-level decision-making?

Is this system extensible enough so that it will likely end up finding unintended and productive uses that its designers and engineers never could have anticipated? For example, might it be helpful to juries in cases involving technically or financially complex matters such as intellectual property or antitrust?

2. See the Subway Fold category of Big Data and Analytics for other posts covering a range of applications in this field.

3. See the Subway Fold category of Smart Systems for other posts on developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning and expert systems.

4. For a highly informative and insightful examination of this phenomenon where data scientists on occasion are not exactly sure about how AI and machine learning systems produce their results, I suggest a click-through and reading of The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI, by Will Knight, which was published in the May/June 2017 issue of MIT Technology Review.

The third of the band’s classic singles can be stretched a bit to be used as a helpful metaphor to describe an emerging form pervasive “all around”-edness, this time in a more technological context. Upon reading a fascinating recent article on TechCrunch.com entitled The Next Stop on the Road to Revolution is Ambient Intelligence, by Gary Grossman, on May 7, 2016, you will find a compelling (but not too rocking) analysis about how the rapidly expanding universe of digital intelligent systems wired into our daily routines is becoming more ubiquitous, unavoidable and ambient each day.

All around indeed. Just as romance can dramatically affect our actions and perspectives, studies now likewise indicate that the relentless global spread of smarter – – and soon thereafter still smarter – – technologies is comparably affecting people’s lives at many different levels.²

I will summarize and annotate it, add some additional context, and then pose some of my own Troggs-inspired questions.

Internet of Experiences

Digital this, that and everything is everywhere in today’s world. There is a surging confluence of connected personal and business devices, the Internet, and the Internet of Things (I0T)³.Woven closely together on a global scale, we have essentially built “a digital intelligence network that transcends all that has gone before”. In some cases, this quantum of advanced technologies gains the “ability to sense, predict and respond to our needs”, and is becoming part of everyone’s “natural behaviors”.

A forth industrial revolution might even manifest itself in the form of machine intelligence whereby we will interact with the “always-on, interconnected world of things”. As a result, the Internet may become characterized more by experiences where users will converse with ambient intelligent systems everywhere. The supporting planks of this new paradigm include:

A prediction of what more fully realized ambient intelligence might look like using travel as an example appeared in an article entitled Gearing Up for Ambient Intelligence, by Lisa Morgan, on InformationWeek.com on March 14, 2016. Upon leaving his or her plane, the traveler will receive a welcoming message and a request to proceed to the curb to retrieve their luggage. Upon reaching curbside, a self-driving car6 will be waiting with information about the hotel booked for the stay.

Listening

Another article about ambient intelligence entitled Towards a World of Ambient Computing, by Simon Bisson, posted on ZDNet.com on February 14, 2014, is briefly quoted for the line “We will talk, and the world will answer”, to illustrate the point that current technology will be morphing into something in the future that would be nearly unrecognizable today. Grossman’s article proceeds to survey a series of commercial technologies recently brought to market as components of a fuller ambient intelligence that will “understand what we are asking” and provide responsive information.

Will it be long before we begin to see similar smart devices everywhere in homes and businesses?

Kevin Kelly, the founding Executive Editor of WIRED and a renowned futurist7, believes that in the near future, digital intelligence will become available in the form of a utility8 and, as he puts it “IQ as a service”. This is already being done by Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft who are providing open access to sections of their AI coding.9 He believes that success for the next round of startups will go to those who enhance and transforms something already in existence with the addition of AI. The best example of this is once again self-driving cars.

As well, in a chapter on Ambient Computing from a report by Deloitte UK entitled Tech Trends 2015, it was noted that some products were engineering ambient intelligence into their products as a means to remain competitive.

Recommending

A great deal of AI is founded upon the collection of big data from online searching, the use of apps and the IoT. This universe of information supports neural networks learn from repeated behaviors including people’s responses and interests. In turn, it provides a basis for “deep learning-derived personalized information and services” that can, in turn, derive “increasingly educated guesses with any given content”.

Bots are another contemporary manifestation of ambient intelligence. These are a form of software agent, driven by algorithms, that can independently perform a range of sophisticated tasks. Two examples include:

Optimally, bots should also be able to listen and “speak” back in return much like a 2-way phone conversation. This would also add much-needed context, more natural interactions and “help to refine understanding” to these human/machine exchanges. Such conversations would “become an intelligent and ambient part” of daily life.

An example of this development path is evident in Google Now. This service combines voice search with predictive analytics to present users with information prior to searching. It is an attempt to create an “omniscient assistant” that can reply to any request for information “including those you haven’t thought of yet”.

The configurations and specs of AI-powered devices, be it lapel pins, some form of augmented reality10 headsets or something else altogether, supporting such pervasive and ambient intelligence are not exactly clear yet. Their development and introduction will take time but remain inevitable.

Will ambient intelligence make our lives any better? It remains to be seen, but it is probably a viable means to handle some of more our ordinary daily tasks. It will likely “fade into the fabric of daily life” and be readily accessible everywhere.

Quite possibly then, the world will truly become a better place to live upon the arrival of ambient intelligence-enabled ocarina solos.

My Questions

Does the emergence of ambient intelligence, in fact, signal the arrival of a genuine fourth industrial revolution or is this all just a semantic tool to characterize a broader spectrum of smarter technologies?

How might this trend also effect non-commercial spheres such as public interest causes and political movements?

As ambient intelligence insinuates itself deeper into our online worlds, will this become a principal driver of new entrepreneurial opportunities for startups? Will ambient intelligence itself provide new tools for startups to launch and thrive?

Today’s marketing and business development professionals use a wide array of big data collection and analytical tools to create and refine sophisticated profiles of market segments and their customer bases. These are deployed in order to systematically and scientifically target and sell their goods and services in steadily changing marketplaces.

These processes can include, among a multitude of other vast data sets and methodologies, demographics, web user metrics and econometrics. Businesses are always looking for a data-driven edge in highly competitive sectors and such profiling, when done correctly, can be very helpful in detecting and interpreting market trends, and consistently keeping ahead of their rivals. (The Subway Fold category of Big Data and Analytics now contains 50 posts about a variety of trends and applications in this field.)

I will briefly to this add my own long-term yet totally unscientific study of office-mess-ographics. Here I have been looking for any correlation between the relative states of organization – – or entropy – – in people’s offices and their work’s quality and output. The results still remain inconclusive after years of study.

One of the most brilliant and accomplished people I have ever known had an office that resembled a cave deep in the earth with piles of paper resembling stalagmites all over it. Even more remarkably, he could reach into any one of those piles and pull out exactly the documents he wanted. His work space was so chaotic that there was a long-standing joke that Jimmy Hoffa’s and Judge Crater’s long-lost remains would be found whenever ever he retired and his office was cleaned out.

Speaking of office-focused analytics, an article posted on VentureBeat.com on March 5, 2016, entitled CMOs: ‘Technographics’ is the New Demographics, by Sean Zinsmeister, brought news of a most interesting new trend. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize and add some context to it, and then pose a few question-ographics of my own.

New Analytical Tool for B2B Marketers

Marketers are now using a new methodology call technography to analyze their customers’ “tech stack“, a term of art for the composition of their supporting systems and platforms. The objective of this approach is to deeply understand what this says about them as a company and, moreover, how can this be used in business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaigns. Thus applied, technography can identify “pain points” in products and alleviate them for current and prospective customers.

Using established consumer marketing methods, there is much to be learned and leveraged on how technology is being used by very granular segments of users bases. For example:

By virtue of this type of technographic data, retailers can target their ads in anticipation of “which customers are most likely to shop in store, online, or via mobile”.

Next, by transposing this form of well-established marketing approach next upon B2B commerce, the objective is to carefully examine the tech stacks of current and future customers in order to gain a marketing advantage. That is, to “inform” a business’s strategy and identify potential new roles and needs to be met. These corporate tech stacks can include systems for:

Technographics can provide unique and valuable insights into assessing, for example, whether a customer values scalability or ease-of-use more, and then act upon this.

As well, some of these technographic signals can be indicative of other factors not, per se, directly related to technology. This was the case at Eloqua, a financial technology concern. They noticed their marketing systems have predictive value in determining the company’s best prospects. Furthermore, they determined that companies running their software were inclined “to have a certain level of technological sophistication”, and were often large enough to have the capacity to purchase higher-end systems.

As business systems continually grow in their numbers and complexity, interpreting technographic nuances has also become more of a challenge. Hence, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) can be helpful in detecting additional useful patterns and trends. In a July 2011 TED Talk by Ted Slavin, directly on point here, entitled How Algorithms Shape Our World, he discussed how algorithms and machine learning are needed today to help make sense out of the massive and constantly growing amounts of data. (The Subway Fold category of Smart Systems contains 15 posts covering recent development and applications involving AI and machine learning.)

Technographic Resources and Use Cases

Currently, technographic signals are readily available from various data providers including:

They parse data using such factors as “web hosting, analytics, e-commerce, advertising, or content management platforms”. Another firm called Ghostery has a Chrome browser extension illuminating the technologies upon which any company’s website is built.

The next key considerations are to “define technographic profiles and determine next-best actions” for specific potential customers. For instance, an analytics company called Looker creates “highly targeted campaigns” aimed at businesses who use Amazon Web Services (AWS). The greater the number of marketers who undertake similar pursuits, the more they raise the value of their marketing programs.

Technographics can likewise be applied for competitive leverage in the following use cases:

Sales reps prospecting for new leads can be supported with more focused messages for potential new customers. These are shaped by understanding their particular motivations and business challenges.

Locating opportunities in new markets can be achieved by assessing the tech stacks of prospective customers. Such analytics can further be used for expanding business development and product development. An example is the online training platform by Mindflash. They detected a potential “demand for a Salesforce training program”. Once it became available, they employed technographic signals to pinpoint customers to whom they could present it.

Enterprise wide decision-making benefits can be achieved by adding “value in areas like cultural alignment”. Familiarity with such data for current employees and job seekers can aid businesses with understanding the “technology disposition” of their workers. Thereafter, its alignment with the “customers or partners” can be pursued. Furthermore, identifying areas where additional training might be needed can help to alleviate productivity issues resulting from “technology disconnects between employees”.

Many businesses are not yet using technographic signals to their full advantage. By increasing such initiatives, businesses can acquire a much deeper understanding of their inherent values. In turn, the resulting insights can have a significant effect on the experiences of their customers and, in turn, elevate their resulting levels of loyalty, retention and revenue, as well as the magnitude of deals done.

My Questions

Would professional service industries such as law, medicine and accounting, and the vendors selling within these industries, benefit from integrating technographics into their own business development and marketing efforts?

Could there be, now or in the future, an emerging role for dedicated technographics specialists, trainers and consultants? Alternatively, should these new analytics just be treated as another new tool to be learned and implemented by marketers in their existing roles?

If a company identifies some of their own employees who might benefit from additional training, how can they be incentivized to participate in it? Could gamification techniques also be applied in creating these training programs?

What, if any, privacy concerns might surface in using technographics on potential customer leads and/or a company’s own internal staff?

Back in the halcyon days of yore before the advent of smartphones and WiFi, there were payphones and phone booths all over of the streets in New York. Most have disappeared, but a few scattered survivors have still managed to hang on. An article entitled And Then There Were Four: Phone Booths Saved on Upper West Side Sidewalks, by Corey Kilgannon, posted on NYTimes.com on February 10, 2016, recounts the stories of some of the last lonely public phones.

Taking their place comes a highly innovative new program called LinkNYC (also @LinkNYC and #LinkNYC). This initiative has just begun to roll out across all five boroughs with a network of what will become thousands of WiFi kiosks providing free and way fast free web access and phone calling, plus a host of other online NYC support services. The kiosks occupy the same physical spaces as the previous payphones.

The first batch of them has started to appear along Third Avenue in Manhattan. I took the photos accompanying this post of one kiosk at the corner of 14th Street and Third Avenue. While standing there, I was able to connect to the web on my phone and try out some of the LinkNYC functions. My reaction: This is very cool beans!

LinkNYC also presents some potentially great new opportunities for marketers. The launch of the program and the companies getting into it on the ground floor were covered in a terrific new article on AdWeek.com on February 15, 2015 entitled What It Means for Consumers and Brands That New York Is Becoming a ‘Smart City’, by Janet Stilson. I recommend reading it in its entirety. I will summarize and annotate it to add some additional context, and pose some of my own ad-free questions.

LinkNYC Set to Proliferate Across NYC

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 2, Image by Alan Rothman

When completed, LinkNYC will give New York a highly advanced mobile network spanning the entire city. Moreover, it will help to transform it into a very well-wired “smart city“.¹ That is, an urban area comprehensively collecting, analyzing and optimizing vast quantities of data generated by a wide array of sensors and other technologies. It is a network and a host of network effects where a city learns about itself and leverages this knowledge for multiple benefits for it citizenry.²

According to Mike Gamaroff, the head of innovation in the New York office of Kinetic Active a global media and marketing firm, LinkNYC is primarily a “utility” for New Yorkers as well as “an advertising network”. Its throughput rates are at gigabit speeds thereby making it the fastest web access available when compared to large commercial ISP’s average rates of merely 20 to 30 megabits.

Nick Cardillicchio, a strategic account manager at Civiq Smartscapes, the designer and manufacturer of the LinkNYC kiosks, said that LinkNYC is the only place where consumers can access the Net at such speeds. For the AdWeek.com article, he took the writer, Janet Stilson, on a tour of the kiosks include the one at Third Avenue and 14th Street, where one of the first ones is in place. (Coincidentally, this is the same kiosk I photographed for this post.)

There are a total of 16 currently operational for the initial testing. The WiFi web access is accessible with 150 feet of the kiosk and can range up to 400 feet. Perhaps those New Yorkers actually living within this range will soon no longer need their commercial ISPs.

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 4, Image by Alan Rothman

The initial advertisers appearing in rotation on the large digital screen include Poland Spring (see the photo at the right), MillerCoors, Pager and Citibank. Eventually “smaller tablet screens” will be added to enable users to make free domestic voice or video calls. As well, they will present maps, local activities and emergency information in and about NYC. Users will also be able to charge up their mobile devices.

However, it is still too soon to assess and quantify the actual impact on such providers. According to David Krupp, CEO, North America, for Kinetic, neither Poland Spring nor MillerCoors has produced an adequate amount of data to yet analyze their respective LinkNYC ad campaigns. (Kinetic is involved in supporting marketing activities.)

Commercializing the Kiosks

The organization managing LinkNYC, the CityBridge consortium (consisting of Qualcomm, Intersection, and Civiq Smartscapes) , is not yet indicating when the new network will progress into a more “commercial stage”. However, once the network is fully implemented with the next few years, the number of kiosks might end up being somewhere between 75,000 and 10,000. That would make it the largest such network in the world.

CityBridge is also in charge of all the network’s advertising sales. These revenues will be split with the city. Under the 12-year contract now in place, this arrangement is predicted to produce $500M for NYC, with positive cash flow anticipated within 5 years. Brad Gleeson, the chief commercial officer at Civiq, said this project depends upon the degree to which LinkNYC is “embraced by Madison Avenue” and the time need for the network to reach “critical mass”.

Because of the breadth and complexity of this project, achieving this inflection point will be quite challenging according to David Etherington, the chief strategy officer at Intersection. He expressed his firm’s “dreams and aspirations” for LinkNYC, including providing advertisers with “greater strategic and creative flexibility”, offering such capabilities as:

Dayparting – dividing a day’s advertising into several segments dependent on a range of factors about the intended audience, and

Hypertargeting – delivering advertising to very highly defined segments of an audience

Barry Frey, the president and CEO of the Digital Place-based Advertising Association, was also along for the tour of the new kiosks on Third Avenue. He was “impressed” by the capability it will offer advertisers to “co-locate their signs and fund services to the public” for such services as free WiFi and long-distance calling.

Poland Spring is now running a 5-week campaign featuring a digital ad (as seen in the third photo above). It relies upon “the brand’s popularity in New York”.

Capturing and Interpreting the Network’s Data

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 1, Image by Alan Rothman

Thus far, LinkNYC has been “a little vague” about its methods for capturing the network’s data, but has said that it will maintain the privacy of all consumers’ information. One source has indicated that LinkNYC will collect, among other points “age, gender and behavioral data”. As well, the kiosks can track mobile devices within its variably 150 to 400 WiFi foot radius to ascertain the length of time a user stops by. Third-party data is also being added to “round out the information”.³

Some industry experts’ expectations of the value and applications of this data include:

Helma Larkin, the CEO of Posterscope, a New York based firm specializing in “out-of- home communications (OOH)“, believes that LinkNYC is an entirely “new out-of-home medium”. This is because the data it will generate “will enhance the media itself”. The LinkNYC initiative presents an opportunity to build this network “from the ground up”. It will also create an opportunity to develop data about its own audience.

David Krupp of Kinetic thinks that data that will be generated will be quite meaningful insofar as producing a “more hypertargeted connection to consumers”.

Other US and International Smart City Initiatives

Currently in the US, there is nothing else yet approaching the scale of LinkNYC. Nonetheless, Kansas City is now developing a “smaller advertiser-supported network of kiosks” with wireless support from Sprint. Other cities are also working on smart city projects. Civiq is now in discussions with about 20 of them.

Internationally, Rio de Janeiro is working on a smart city program in conjunction with the 2016 Olympics. This project is being supported by Renato Lucio de Castro, a consultant on smart city projects. (Here is a brief video of him describing this undertaking.)

A key challenge facing all smart city projects is finding officials in local governments who likewise have the enthusiasm for efforts like LinkNYC. Michael Lake, the CEO of Leading Cities, a firm that help cities with smart city projects, believes that programs such as LinkNYC will “continue to catch on” because of the additional security benefits they provide and the revenues they can generate.

My Questions

Should domestic and international smart cities to cooperate to share their resources, know-how and experience for each other’s mutual benefit? Might this in some small way help to promote urban growth and development on a more cooperative global scale?

Should LinkNYC also consider offering civic support services such as voter registration or transportation scheduling apps as well as charitable functions where pedestrians can donate to local causes?

February 19, 2017 Update: For the latest status report on LinkNYC nearly a year after this post was first uploaded, please see After Controversy, LinkNYC Finds Its Niche, by Gerald Schifman, on CrainsNewYork.com, dated February 15, 2017.

1. While Googling “smart cities” might nearly cause the Earth to shift off its axis with its resulting 70 million hits, I suggest reading a very informative and timely feature from the December 11, 2015 edition of The Wall Street Journal entitled As World Crowds In, Cities Become Digital Laboratories, by Robert Lee Hotz.

2. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), by Anthony M. Townsend, is a deep and wide book-length exploration of how big data and analytics are being deployed in large urban areas by local governments and independent citizens. I very highly recommend reading this fascinating exploration of the nearly limitless possibilities for smart cities.

These items just in from the Pop Culture Department: It would seem nearly impossible to film an entire movie thriller about a series of events centered around a public phone, but a movie called – – not so surprisingly – – Phone Booth managed to do this quite effectively in 2002. It stared Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland and Forest Whitaker. Imho, it is still worth seeing.

Furthermore, speaking of Kiefer Sutherland, Fox announced on January 15, 2016 that it will be making 24: Legacy, a complete reboot of the 24 franchise, this time without him playing Jack Bauer. Rather, they have cast Corey Hawkins in the lead role. Hawkins can now be seen doing an excellent job playing Heath on season 6 of The Walking Dead. Watch out Grimes Gang, here comes Negan!!

When people are dating it is often said that they are looking for “Mr. Right” or “Ms. Right”. That is, finding someone who is just the right romantic match for them.

In the case of today’s rapid development, experimentation and implementation of blockchain technology, if a startup’s new technology takes hold, it might soon find a highly productive (but maybe not so romantic) match in finding Mr. or Ms. [literal] Right by deploying the blockchain as a form of global registry of creative works ownership.

Applications of blockchain technology for the potential management of economic and distribution benefits of “creative professions”, including writers, musicians and others, that have been significantly affected by prolific online file copying still remains relatively unexplored. As a result, they do not yet have the means to “prove and protect ownership” of their work. Moreover, they do have an adequate system to monetize their digital works. But the blockchain, by virtue of its structural and operational nature, can supply these creators with “provenance, identity and micropayments“. (See also the October 27, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled Summary of the Bitcoin Seminar Held at Kaye Scholer in New York on October 15, 2015 for some background on these three elements.)

Now on to the efforts of a startup called Mine ( @mine_labs ), co-founded by Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov¹. They are preparing to launch a new metadata protocol called Mediachain that enables creators working in digital media to write data describing their work along with a timestamp directly onto the blockchain. (Yet another opportunity to go out on a sort of, well, date.) This system is based upon the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Mine believes that IPSF is a “more readable format” than others presently available.

Walden thinks that Mediachain’s “decentralized nature”, rather than a more centralized model, is critical to its objectives. Previously, a very “high-profile” somewhat similar initiative to establish a similarly global “database of musical rights and works” called the Global Repertoire Database (GDR) had failed.

(Mine maintains this page of a dozen recent posts on Medium.com about their technology that provides some interesting perspectives and details about the Mediachain project.)

Mediachain’s Objectives

Walden and Nazarov have tried to innovate by means of changing how media businesses interact with the Internet, as opposed to trying to get them to work within its established standards. Thus, the Mediachain project has emerged with its focal point being the inclusion of descriptive data and attribution for image files by combining blockchain technology and machine learning². As well, it can accommodate reverse queries to identify the creators of images.

Nazarov views Mediachain “as a global rights database for images”. When used in conjunction with, among others, Instagram, he and Walden foresee a time when users of this technology can retrieve “historic information” about a file. By doing so, they intend to assist in “preserving identity”, given the present challenges of enforcing creator rights and “monetizing content”. In the future, they hope that Mediachain inspires the development of new platforms for music and movies that would permit ready access to “identifying information for creative works”. According to Walden, their objective is to “unbundle identity and distribution” and provide the means to build new and more modern platforms to distribute creative works.

Potential Applications for Public Institutions

Mine’s co-founders believe that there is further meaningful potential for Mediachain to be used by public organizations who provide “open data sets for images used in galleries, libraries and archives”. For example:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (“The Met” as it is referred to on their website and by all of my fellow New York City residents), has a mandate to license the metadata about the contents of their collections. The museum might have a “metadata platform” of its own to host many such projects.

The New York Public Library has used their own historical images, that are available to the public to, among other things, create maps.³Nazarov and Walden believe they could “bootstrap the effort” by promoting Mediachain’s expanded apps in “consumer-facing projects”.

Maintaining the Platform Security, Integrity and Extensibility

Prior to Mediachain’s pending launch, Walden and Nazarov are highly interested in protecting the platform’s legitimate users from “bad actors” who might wrongfully claim ownership of others’ rightfully owned works. As a result, to ensure the “trust of its users”, their strategy is to engage public institutions as a model upon which to base this. Specifically, Mine’s developers are adding key functionality to Mediachain that enables the annotation of images.

The new platform will also include a “reputation system” so that subsequent users will start to “trust the information on its platform”. In effect, their methodology empowers users “to vouch for a metadata’s correctness”. The co-founders also believe that the “Mediachain community” will increase or decrease trust in the long-term depending on how it operates as an “open access resource”. Nazarov pointed to the success of Wikipedia to characterize this.

Following the launch of Mediachain, the startup’s team believes this technology could be integrated into other existing social media sites such as the blogging platform Tumblr. Here they think it would enable users to search images including those that may have been subsequently altered for various purposes. As a result, Tumblr would then be able to improve its monetization efforts through the application of better web usage analytics.

The same level of potential, by virtue of using Mediachain, may likewise be found waiting on still other established social media platforms. Nazarov and Walden mentioned seeing Apple and Facebook as prospects for exploration. Nazarov said that, for instance, Coindesk.com could set its own terms for its usage and consumption on Facebook Instant Articles (a platform used by publishers to distribute their multimedia content on FB). Thereafter, Mediachain could possibly facilitate the emergence of entirely new innovative media services.

Nazarov and Walden temper their optimism because the underlying IPFS basis is so new and acceptance and adoption of it may take time. As well, they anticipate “subsequent issues” concerning the platform’s durability and the creation of “standards for metadata”. Overall though, they remain sanguine about Mediachain’s prospects and are presently seeking developers to embrace these challenges.

How would applications built upon Mediachain affect or integrate with digital creative works distributed by means of a Creative Commons license?

What new entrepreneurial opportunities for startup services might arise if this technology eventually gains web-wide adoption and trust among creative communities? For example, would lawyers and accountants, among many others, with clients in the arts need to develop and offer new forms of guidance and services to navigate a Mediachain-enabled marketplace?

How and by whom should standards for using Mediachain and other potential development path splits (also known as “forks“), be established and managed with a high level of transparency for all interested parties?

Does analogizing what Bitcoin is to the blockchain also hold equally true for what Mediachain is to the blockchain, or should alternative analogies and perspectives be developed to assist in the explanation, acceptance and usage of this new platform?

1. This link from Mine’s website is to an article entitled Introducing Mediachain by Denis Nazarov, originally published on Medium.com on January 2, 2016. He mentions in his text an earlier startup called Diaspora that ultimately failed in its attempt at creating something akin to the Mediachain project. This December 4, 2014 Subway Fold post entitled Book Review of “More Awesome Than Money” concerned a book that expertly explored the fascinating and ultimately tragic inside story of Diaspora.

2. Many of the more than two dozen Subway Fold posts in the category of Smart Systems cover some of the recent news, trends and applications in machine learning.

In the wake of the destruction left by the Enron scandal and subsequent bankruptcy in the early 2000s, one of the more revelatory and instructive artifacts left behind was the massive trove of approximately 1,600,000 of the company’s corporate emails. Researchers from a variety of fields have performed all manner of extensive analyses on this “corpus” of emails as it known. Of particular interest was the structure and operations of this failed company’s communications network. That is, simply stated, extracting and examining who’s who and what’s what in this failed organization.

No other database of this type, size and depth had ever been previously available for such purposes. What the researchers have learned from this and its subsequent and significant influences in many public and private sectors was the subject of a fascinating article in MIT Technology Review posted on July 2, 2013 entitled The Immortal Life of the Enron E-mails by Jessica Lander. I highly recommend reading this.

[July 18, 2017 Update: For a new deep and wide analysis of the Enron email database, see What the Enron E-Mails Say About Us, by Nathan Heller, in the 7/24/17 edition of The New Yorker.]

I immediately recalled this piece recently while reading a column posted on the Harvard Business Review blog on February 10, 2016 entitled What Work Email Can Reveal About Performance and Potential by Chantrelle Nielsen. This analytical processes and consulting projects it describes could be of highly practical value to all manners and sizes of organizations. I also suggest reading this in its entirety. I will summarize, annotate and pose some emoji-free questions of my own.

I believe this post will also provide a logical follow-on to the February 15, 2016 Subway Fold post entitled Establishing a Persuasive Digital Footprint for Competing in Today’s Job Market. That post covered the importance a job candidate’s digital presence before being hired while this post covers the predictive potential of an employee’s digital presence after they have become an employee and integrated themselves into an organization.

Data Generation

The author begins by focusing her attention upon the modern tools and platforms used in the workplace for people to communicate and collaborate such as Skype and Slack. More traditionally, there is email. While these modes are important, they can also be a “mixed blessing”. Careful management of these technologies can assist is determining which forms of “digital communications are productive” for both employers and their employees.

Most importantly, these systems produce huge volumes of data. As a result, some firms are developing “next generation products” containing analytical capabilities to deeply dive into these databases and the networks they support.¹,²

The author mentions that her former company, VoloMetrix, is engaged in this field and has been acquired by Microsoft. The examples and her article concern work done for the firm’s clients before it become part of MS. During this time, VoloMetrix worked for years “with executives in large enterprises” to enable them to discern patterns within employees’ digital communications.

Predicting Employee Performance

A “strong network” can be a predictive factor of an employee’s performance. For example, a software company looked at a year’s worth of anonymized employee email data across all job categories. The findings showed that:

The best performers were characterized by 36% larger in-house networks, when compared to average performers, where they connected “at least biweekly in small group messages”. (This criterion was used to determine “strong ties”).

The lower performers exhibited “6% smaller networks” when compared to average performers.

On an annual basis, the “size and strength” of employees’ networks proved to a better predictor of their performances than managers’ more traditional assessments. Thus, being “intensely engaged” in collaborating with their peers was a driver of their work performance.

This effect was likewise seen at other business-to-business sales concerns. For instance, at a software company the top 10 workers in sales were, on average, connected to 10 or more of their colleagues. Their internal networks proved to be 25% larger than the networks of low performers. When social graph data (used to visualize the structures of networks), was examined it frequently indicated that connections within a company were even more important than those outside of it.

Predicting Employee Potential

Some businesses use “engagement programs” to assist the careers of employees are seen as having high potential to become future leaders. For example, a utility company studied the networks of a few hundreds of these people. They discovered that:

Those people who “were often the most connected” were shown to have networks “52% larger than average”.

Nonetheless, there were still others within this same group having networks of “below average” dimensions.

Managers surveyed reported that the less connected workers also had “great skills or ideas”, but displayed “potentially less” extroversion³ or emotional intelligence4 needed to become influential.Still, opportunities are available to assist these people to “gain a broader audience” with better connected “agents” who, in turn, can promote their ideas.

Furthermore, growing a large network only for its own sake is not always the optimal approach. Rather, some networks are “more effective” because of who they include. That is, if they include people who have higher degrees of influence.

Another client, a hardware company, advanced their analysis to examine the “composition and quality” of the networks assembled by their sales reps. Their findings indicated that:

The “involvement of certain sales roles” corresponded to a 10X increase in the size of deals with customers.

Some sales roles were characterized as “middlemen” and, as such, did not “clearly demonstrate” anyone’s personal leadership potential.

Synthesizing Two Approaches

As described above, two analytical approaches have emerged for examining and leveraging the insights gained from communications networks. Both can work well in conjunction with the other. First is awareness whereby business leaders:

Communicate the importance of building networks

Provide the network analytical tools

Maintain the “faith” that their employees will understand this message and act upon it

The second is the prediction of outcomes, most often by sales organization to determine “which deals will close”. While this currently is applied less often than the awareness approach, this situation is now changing.

The insights gained from studying communications networks which are then applied to help build better working relationships and performance, must be “used thoughtfully” while balancing human and technological factors. Moreover, for these to work properly and “make connections more meaningful and efficient”, effectively gathering sufficient data on how employees do their jobs and communicate with their peers is essential.

My Questions

What standards should be established to assess communication and collaboration networks? Should they be the same for all businesses and job types or varied from field to field? Should they be differentiated further from employer to employer within a field and then perhaps for every department and job title within the same firm? (For some excellent new reading on how professional networks compare in their breadth and effectiveness in different professions, I highly recommend reading another new article on The Harvard Business Review blog posted on February 19, 2016 entitled How Having an MBA vs. a Law Degree Shapes Your Network by Adina Sterling.)

How should “influential” members of a network be defined in a business environment? Is influencer marketing, where individuals with a significant online presence appear to have more influence upon others in their social networks and are thus given special attention by marketers, the correct model to consider? If so, should businesses consider developing and applying the equivalent of a Klout score to their employees? (This is an online service that rates one’s relative influence across much of social media.)

Would it be helpful to a company’s workforce to make this data and analytics readily available to everyone on their internal network and, if so, what would be the benefits and/or drawbacks of doing so? Would access to one’s network’s shape and reach result in some unintended consequences such as pressuring workers to increase the size of their internal and external contacts?

Should rewards systems be piloted to see whether they can positively incentivize employees to nurture their networks? For example, for X amount of new contacts added that support a company’s goals, Y additional days off might be awarded.

Can network analytics be used to fairly or unfairly restrict workers with non-competition and non-disclosure clauses when they change jobs?

1. Many of these 26 Subway Fold posts under the Category of Social Media also involve metrics and analytical systems for interpreting the voluminous data generated by a wide range of social media services.

2. A thriving market exists today in enterprise search products that can index, search and unlock the valuable knowledge embedded deep within corporate email and other data platforms. Here is a list of vendors on Wikipedia.

When you go to visit someone for either personal or business reasons, your host will, depending on the weather, politely ask and try to make sure that you do not track anything in from the outside. Yet in the case of a job search, this is exactly want you want to do but in the entirely virtual sense by focusing the attention of prospective employers upon your tracks across the web. Hence, your online digital footprint informs them that you fully understand how to create meaningful content and a genuine presence, and your facility with web technology.

I first became aware of this over twenty years ago. A friend told me a story about something that he did quite spontaneously during a job interview. This incident and its outcome were strikingly clever back then and its lesson still rings true today.

He had gone for an interview at an Internet startup. Despite his impeccable credentials and accomplishments, he sensed that he was getting nowhere with the interviewer. At the end of their discussion, he thought he had nothing to lose and offered to show the interviewer his own “fan web page” for The Rolling Stones. The interviewer was stunned that he even knew how to create a web page, something that unheard of at that time by anyone interviewing for this type of position. The interviewer immediately called in some of his colleagues to see this.

To borrow a line from Mick and Keith, you can’t always get what you want, but … my friend was offered the job on the spot. He had creatively and completely distinguished himself from all of the other highly qualified candidates by demonstrating that he understood and could apply the latest technology at the core of the company’s business. This was the first instance I was ever aware of where someone had successfully created and introduced his own unique online digital footprint into a job search. What was a novelty way back then has become nearly a necessity in many fields in today’s highly competitive job market.

The latest report on this trend was an insightful and instructive post in the February 2, 2016 edition of Knowledge@Wharton entitled Job Hunting? Why You Need a Strong Online Footprint (no author is credited). I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize, annotate, and posed some of my own questions on making job seekers more of a, well, shoe-in during their searches.

Digital Footprints and Reputations in Relevant Online Communities

The conventional wisdom for today’s typical job searcher is to have a well-crafted resume and cover letter, and to have nothing questionable appear when a prospective employer Googles you. This has evolved further to the point where “establishing a strong and compelling online presence” is often required to land a first interview. Employers are looking for candidates who have developed a respectable online presence, particularly in their relevant “professional community”.

As discussed by some of the leading experts interviewed for this report:

Monica McGrath, formerly the Vice Dean of Education at Wharton, is currently at work on “renewing her consulting” business. She has been surprised along the way by the number of inquiries by potential clients concerning whether she has “built a presence on blogs”. Specifically, they have been interested in determining whether, beyond merely a LinkedIn profile, whether she has developed a unique and professional “voice” as an expert.

Samantha Wallace, a recruiter at Korn Ferry Futurestep, believes that if a candidate’s digital footprint is not evident in an online network of importance to a client, the candidate might be removed from consideration. Such exclusion might occur when it significantly matters that a candidate has established a digital presence relevant to the job opportunity.

Peter Capelli, the Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, find this a “remarkable shift” from prior times when executives were told to avoid the distractions of activities away from their jobs. While the same employer might still discourage this, they are nonetheless now expecting it in new candidates.

More than one-third of prospective employers are disinclined to grant an interview for a candidate for whom no online data can be found.

Greater than 50% use social media to research candidates.

56% checked for a relevant digital footprint.

37% researched “what others were” posting about job seekers.

One-third of hiring managers found information online that resulted in extending a job offer.

Furthermore, some candidates are being asked for their user credentials for their social media accounts because employers believe this can lead them to “a deeper layer of comments” and other data. Privacy advocates are understandably concerned about this. As of 2015, nine states have passed legislation preventing such requests in order to “get or keep a job”.

This fundamental change in the recruiting process has forces employees and their prospective hires alike to examine their roles. Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard believes that issues of privacy concern “society in general”, not limited only to employers requesting access to someone’s Facebook account. Rather, companies like Google are aware of “almost everything about you”, and the breadth of anyone’s digital trail online is tremendous. She thinks that the “people analytics movement” attempts to gather and intuit the vast stores of information about individuals, thus presenting a privacy issue here that has yet to be addressed in the job market.

Tending to Your Own Digital Footprint

The popular news site Buzzfeed recently posted an opening for a Social Media Strategist. The online application asked for candidates’ resume and links to social media accounts or their blogs. (Click on the preceding link and this can be seen under “To Apply”.) Thus, all of the applicants’ digital footprints are essential to the job because, in turn “developing a digital footprint is the job”.

But should the same be true for other positions and businesses?

According to Jon Bische, the CEO of the recruiting platform firm Entelo, there is some room here depending on the circumstances and nature of the job, but in many fields it is “reasonable to expect some digital presence”. For example, in searching for an engineer or designer, there are now professional networks that have become a “community of record” for a field, and other sites where their professional coding and designs can be assessed. He believes that doing so “gets close to someone’s abilities”.

We are likely still in the early stages of determining how to distinguish oneself online as an expert in their field. Ms. Wallace thinks defining this is still “ambiguous” since it is the individual himself or herself who is creating their own digital footprint and thus they will intentionally “find the connections to promote themselves” as experts.

Mr. Bischke offered the following suggestions for creating a viable digital footprint and control your personal brand including:

Google yourself to make certain the top links “are professional and up to date”. Take steps to make any corrections to insure their accuracy.

Establish profiles on sites and among networks within your field.

Make sure that your information is “presented consistently” across these online venues.

“Generational factors” also influence the nature and breadth of someone’s digital footprint. This is particularly so for Millennials, the global demographic group including people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. They are growing significantly in the population and work force, and will have digital footprints that present “a different sense of self than their elders”.

My Questions

Depending upon the particular profession, how will employers now and in the future, assign relative weighting in evaluating:

Candidate A who went to a top-level university and distinguished himself academically but who only has a small online footprint in comparison to

Candidate B who attended a more mid-level university but she has strategically built a very robust online presence and respectable reputation across peer sites and forums?

What are the possible offsets and equivalents between these two types of hypothetical applicants?

Engaging a professional to do implement these strategies or might that be gaming the system a too much?

Will situations arise where employers who are impressed by someone’s digital footprint still try to recruit this person even though he or she is not currently looking for another job? (There was a very similar story in an August 24, 2015 post on TheHustle.com entitled Google Has a Secret Interview Process… And It Landed Me a Job, by Max Rosett, where the company recruited the author based on the subjects and contexts of his searches.)